Edwin Morgan

This collection of lyric epiphanies reveals the focus and refocus of sequences, the wily relocation of words in concrete poems, and the weird rhythms of sound poems. The poet's transforming imagination is democratic, generous, and inclusive. Even the sonnet form becomes a new experiment for a poet of questing and anarchic vision, unwilling to rest on rules. This volume includes Poems of Thirty Years, Themes on a Variation, and some 50 uncollected poems from 1939 to 1982.

Edwin Morgan: Collected Poems

This is the third Selected Poems by Edwin Morgan from Carcanet, but the first since 2000 and the first to cover the full range of his poetry from his first collection in 1952 to his last in 2010, the year of his death at the age of ninety. All his different voices speak here - animals, inanimate objects, dramatic monologues by people, (famous people, unknown people and imaginary people) - in a multitude of forms and styles - sonnets, science fiction, concrete, sound, his own invented stanzas - together with his evocations of place, especially his home city of Glasgow, and a wide selection of his deservedly famous love poems. They all illustrate his incurable curiosity and a kind of relentless optimism for humanity.

Centenary Selected Poems

A Life of Charles Baudelaire

Flower of Evil

This reprint of Morgan's popular and well-respected 1952 modern English translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic captures a taut expression of the poem's themes of danger, voyaging, displacement, loyalty, and loss. Morgan provides a fluid, modern voice from this medieval masterwork while retaining a clear authenticity, making it highly accessible to the contemporary reader.

A Verse Translation Into Modern English

Beowulf

Edwin Morgan 'catches in full sight' in his lyric epiphanies, in the focus and refocus of sequences, the wily reification of words in concrete poems, the weird rhythms of sound poems. His transforming imagination is democratic, generous and inclusive. Even the sonnet form becomes a new experiment for a poet of questing and anarchic vision, unwilling to rest on rules. 'More than the work of most poets,' writes Iain Crichton Smith, Morgan's poetry 'welcomes the twentieth century, with its gadgets, its paradoxes, graffiti, new languages, torn advertisements, unconscious jokes, voyages...' This volume includes Poems of Thirty Years, Themes on a Variation, and some fifty uncollected poems from 1939 to 1982.

Collected Poems

Life of Charles Baudelaire

C. M. Grieve, or ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’ as he is best known, has written under both names, and in this he seems to be following a Scottish custom (one could instance ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon’) and J. Leslie Mitchell, or ‘James Bridie’ and O. H. Mavor). But whether two, or more than two identities meet in his work, there is no doubt that he is one of the most far-ranging, original, and remarkable poets of his time. Apart from his natural abilities, and the recognizable quality of his best work, Hugh MacDiarmid has a noted historical importance in Scotland in the double aim he proposed to himself in the 1920s, of reviving and extending the use of Scots into a full medium of expression, and of initiating a new, vigorous, and modern phase of Scottish poetry and (in company with other) of Scottish literature in general. From the startling economy of his early lyrics, through the developed, highly imaginative symbolism of A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, to his later, more provocative experiments in very long ‘poems of knowledge’, Hugh MacDiarmid has never ceased to explore what is there to be explored – experience, language, ideas, books. If his work is sui generis, it also has considerable variety of appeal, and a depth of challenge to the interested reader.

Hugh MacDiarmid

Edwin Morgan was appointed Poet Laureate of Glasgow in 1999, and many of these poems reflect the life of the city both now and in the past. But equally the poetry moves to other places and other worlds. A sequence of poems about a demon allows the mind to expatiate on a wide range of subjects, social, psychological, philosophical. Some of the poems have been set to music, both jazz and classical. In many ways it is a book of voices and observation, a book of accessible storytelling.

New Poems 1997-2001

Cathures

Demon

Sonnets from Scotland

Edwin Morgans verse play translation of the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh brings an ancient story to life in a supple, vigorous idiom that moves easily between ritual, comedy and moments of intense beauty. Here a god-king, a great city builder, learns the timeless truth that the only immortality lies in what will be remembered and recorded of his actions. Gilgameshs quest takes him, and the audience, on a journey through a world that is both mythic and familiar, inhabited by terrifying demons and disappeared political prisoners, by gods and singing transvestites and a Glaswegian jester and by Enkidu, the beloved child of nature who dies of a virus in the blood, through whom Gilgamesh learns to understand the meaning of loss.

The Play of Gilgamesh

One of the central figures of twentieth-century Scottish literature, Edwin Morgan was a prolific letter-writer. His correspondence, like his poetry, is wide-ranging, full of generosity and enthusiasm, and above all testament to his lifelong commitment to exploring the possibilities of poetry. This selection of his letters, spanning Morgan's full career as a teacher and writer, enables readers to track the development of his ideas, his friendships and his creative collaborations. At the same time it provides a superbly engaging portrait of a man with a boundless interest in the fast-changing world around him.

Selected Correspondence (1950-2010)

The Midnight Letterbox

Edwin Morgan 'catches in full sight' in his lyric epiphanies, in the focus and refocus of sequences, the wily relocation of words in concrete poems, the weird rhythms of sound poems. His transforming imagination is democratic, generous and inclusive. Even the sonnet form becomes a new experiment for a poet of questing and anarchic vision, unwilling to rest on rules. 'More than the work of most poets,' writes lain Crichton Smith, Morgan's poetry 'welcomes the twentieth century, with its gadgets, its paradoxes, graffiti, new languages, torn advertisements, unconscious jokes, voyages...' This volume includes Poems of Thirty Years, Themes on a Variation, and some fifty uncollected poems from 1939 to 1982.

Edwin Morgan

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